Cooking on Reality TV: Chef-Participants and Culinary Television

Culinary television has been part of the televisual landscape for most of the medium’s existence. It has fared particularly well with television’s transition into the ‘post-network era,’ a period characterised by niche programming, small homogenous audiences, non-linear viewing practices, and multichannel landscapes. Like other kinds of popular factual programming (Caldwell, 2004; Raphael, 2009), the growth of culinary television over the past decade has been due in large part to low production costs and an ability to easily adapt content to meet the brand-specific needs of particular niche channels. As Isabelle de Solier argues (2004), this has led culinary television to expand to include a range of food-related programming that often operates using reality TV formats. During this transition, the types of television personalities who once anchored culinary television have also evolved. Television cooks that fit the mould of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, as Cheri Ketchum notes (2007), have multiplied to the point of comprising entire days of instructional food programming and are regularly cast as judges, hosts, and, increasingly, contestants on survival-oriented reality shows.